A different man on the bus seems to believe the Grey Town is Purgatory, telling the narrator that as bad as it is, it will one day get worse when the long evening finally ends and night descends. When a gleamingly bright bus arrives, the narrator has to sit by a very talkative young man, who explains that he was sent to the Grey Town after his death by suicide. This study guide uses the 2015 HarperCollins paperback edition of the novel.Īt the start of Chapter 1, the novel’s unnamed narrator finds himself standing in a bus line in a drab, gray town. In addition to Blake’s poem, The Great Divorce evokes works of literature in which an everyman narrator embarks on a spiritual journey, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Unlike Blake, who expresses a dualistic belief that good and evil feed off each other in a symbiotic relationship, Lewis suggests that the separation of good and evil will be eternal in the afterlife, and that humans must sacrifice their sinful natures in order to enter God’s presence. The novel’s title references Romantic writer William Blake’s poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
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